| Total population | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 720,000 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Regions with significant populations | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Languages | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Religion | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Predominantly † Orthodox Christianity |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Related ethnic groups | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans |
The Ossetians (Ossetic: ирæттæ, irættæ) are an Iranic ethnic group of the Caucasus Mountains, eponymous of the region known as Ossetia.[8][9][10] They speak Ossetic, an Iranian language of the Eastern branch, with most also fluent in Russian as a second language. The Ossetians are mostly Eastern Orthodox Christian, with a Muslim minority.
The Ossetians mostly populate Ossetia, which is politically divided between North Ossetia-Alania in Russia, and South Ossetia, which since the 2008 South Ossetia war has been de-facto independent from Georgia.
Contents |
The Russian geographic name "Ossetia" and the corresponding ethnic designation "Ossetians" comes from a Georgian root.
The Russians originally called the Ossetians Yas (ясы, connected with Iazyges).
In Late Antiquity, records became much more diffuse and the Iazyges generally ceased to be mentioned as a tribe. In the Middle Ages an East Iranian people appeared in Eastern-Europe, the Jazones. The Jazones, or Jász, an Ossetic people who migrated to Hungary, are first mentioned in Hungarian records in the year 1318, and their name, spelled in Greek means "Jasons" (Ιάσωνες). The Jász in Hungary maintained their language until the 18th century. While they have become linguistically Hungarian, descendants in the Jász area of Hungary still maintain some original culture and have folk consciousness of their origins.
In the late 14th century, the Russians adopted the Georgian name of the Ossetians and their nation. In the Georgian language, Alania and the Alans are known as Oseti (ოსეთი) and Osebi (ოსები) respectively. From the Russian language the names Ossetia and Ossetians entered other languages.
Nowadays the Ossetians themselves refer to their nation as irættæ (pl.) or Iron (singular) (< Irān, related to Indo-European آریا ārya 'noble').
It is believed that Joseph Stalin was at least half Ossetian.
The folk beliefs of the Ossetian people are rooted in their Sarmatian and Christian origin, with the pagan gods transcending into Christian saints. The Nart saga serves the basic pagan mythology of the region.[11]
The Ossetians descend from the Alans, a Sarmatian tribe (Scythian subgroup of the Iranic ethnolinguistic group).[12] About A.D. 200, the Alans were the only branch of the Sarmatians to keep their culture in the face of a Gothic invasion, and the Alans remaining built up a great kingdom between the Don and the Volga, according to Coon, The Races of Europe. Between A.D. 350 and 374, the Huns destroyed the Alan kingdom, and a few survive to this day in the Caucasus as the Ossetes.
In the 8th century a consolidated Alan kingdom, referred to in sources of the period as Alania, emerged in the northern Caucasus Mountains, roughly in the location of the latter-day Circassia and the modern North Ossetia-Alania. At its height, Alania was a centralized monarchy with a strong military force and benefited from the Silk Road.
Forced out of their medieval homeland (south of the River Don in present-day Russia) during Mongol rule, Alans migrated towards and over the Caucasus mountains, where they subsequently would form three ethnographical groups; the Iron, Digor, and Kudar. The Jassic people were a group that migrated in the 13th century to Hungary.
In recent history, the Ossetians participated in Ossetian-Ingush conflict (1991–1992) and Georgian–Ossetian conflicts (1918–1920, early 1990s) and in the 2008 South Ossetia war between Georgia and Russia.
Key events:
The Ossetic language belongs to the Northeastern Iranian branch of Indo-European language family.
Ossetic is divided into two main dialect groups: Ironian (os. - Ирон) in North and South Ossetia and Digorian (os. - Дыгурон) of western North Ossetia. There are some subdialects in those two: like Tualian, Alagirian, Ksanian, etc. Ironian dialect is the most widely spoken.
Ossetic is among the remnants of the Scytho-Sarmatian dialect group which was once spoken across Central Asia. Other surviving languages closely related to Ossetic are Yaghnobi,[19] Pashto[19] and Pamiri languages,[19] all spoken more than 2,000 km to the east in Afghanistan and some parts of Tajikistan and northwestern Pakistan.
The Alans were partially Christianized by Byzantine missionaries in the beginning of the 10th century.[20] Most of the Ossetians became Eastern Orthodox Christians in the 12th-13th centuries under the influence of Georgia.[21][22]
As the time went by, Digor in the west came under Kabardian and Islamic influence. It was through the Kabarday (an East Circassian tribe) that Islam was introduced into the region in the 17th century.[23]
Kudar in the southernmost region became part of what is now South Ossetia, and Iron, the northernmost group, came under Russian rule after 1767, which strengthened Orthodox Christianity considerably.
Today the majority of Ossetians, from both North and South Ossetia, follow Eastern Orthodoxy, although there is a sizable number of adherents to Islam.
Traces of paganism are still very widespread among Ossetians, with rich ritual traditions, sacrificing animals, holy shrines, non-Christian saints, etc.
The vast majority of Ossetians live in Russia (according to the Russian Census (2002)):
Second-largest population of Ossetians is in South Ossetia.
There is a significant number living in north-central Georgia (Trialeti). A large Ossetian diaspora lives in Turkey, and Ossetians have also settled in France, Sweden, Syria, the USA (New York City, Florida and California as examples), Canada (Toronto) and other countries all around the world.
The Ossetians are a unique ethnic group of the Caucasus, being the only people found on both the north and south slopes of the mountain, also speaking an Indo-European language surrounded by Caucasian ethnolinguistic groups. The Y-haplogroup data indicate that North Ossetians are more similar to other North Caucasian groups, and South Ossetians are more similar to other South Caucasian groups, than to each other. Also, with respect to mtDNA, Ossetians are significantly more similar to Iranian groups than to Caucasian groups. It is thus suggested that that there is a common origin of Ossetians from Iran, followed by subsequent male-mediated migrations from their Caucasian neighbours [24][25]
|
||||||||||||||||||||||